Our current lodgings are out in the middle of the Waterlands, a low-lying, flat, agricultural, and very irrigated-via-canals section of the Netherlands just north of Amsterdam.
The flat bit means that when it’s windy, the wind is Serious Business. It howls against our house at night and whips the rain and ice chunks into your mortal flesh as if it has something to prove. (You don’t, wind, stop it!)
And it has been doing this every day since we have arrived here, except for the first. Well, you can’t always win vacation weather roulette.
We had two traditional Dutch Stuff days ahead of us: Thursday, the Zuiderzee museum, and Friday – the Alkmaar Cheese Market and a bit of Zaanse Shans. Cheeeeeeeeeese!
Thursday featured wild weather luck: there was a sizable gap in the rain – a windy gap, but a gap! We decided this meant it was a good day to go to the Zuiderzee (pronounced ZAI-der-zay) museum. This indoor/outdoor museum captures life in the Zuiderzee area before the massive dam & dykes were installed to tame an inlet of the North Sea. The area had been flood-prone for centuries, and a massive flood in 1916 provided the final impetus to start the land reclamation project.
The Dutch: if the sea won’t cooperate, we will tame it. And thus – lots of land was reclaimed. The wikipedia article on the project (the Zuiderzee Works) is really fascinating, so I will leave you to read it if you choose.
Of course – reclaiming the land meant that it put a significant amount of fishing villages out of work – so the museum sought to replicate the buildings and artifacts of the people of the Zuiderzee. It had 140 outdoor buildings, all of which were disassembled and relocated to the museum in the 50s and 60s. Now, they stand as time capsules of life between 1880 and 1930 in the areas around the sea.
It is definitely worth a visit to explore each open house, with its many indoor exhibits and staged homes that replicated life in the villages. We only saw two people who were in traditional garb in the outdoor museum. I assume this is because the museum probably had only 30 visitors that day. It looks like it gets quite hoppin when it’s nice out!
Because of (or thanks to?) the garbage weather, we had the place basically to ourselves. There was a smaller school group visiting, and a handful of other tourists – but it was basically deserted. Perfect for wandering in and out of the buildings!
Our second stop was the indoor museum, which chronicled the lives, rituals, and culture of individual towns along the Zuiderzee. Life was really different from town to town, brought to life through clothing and home decor and rituals presented in the exhibits.
Towards the end of our museum visit, I noticed that the wind had returned to threat level demon and that the windows were getting newly pelted with rain drops. We finished up our visit and headed back through the village and to the ferry. It was maybe about 15 minutes of walking. In that time, it downpoured on us, cleared up, and then was very menacing until we got back to the car. Crazy weather.
On our way back, we went up to the point where the dam started, up in Den Oever. That seemed like a good idea, but this is where the wind leveled up: it was now threat level dragon. You could lean into this wind and not fall over. So….I did that.
You will note in the picture below that the sky is blue. That is, in fact, a lie – because I was sleeted upon no less than 30 seconds after taking this photo.
Not our best choice, but it was an exciting one. And we saw some water so that was neat.
Friday was the one time the weather was cooperative: it’s a bright, sunny day. It is a day for the Cheese Market in Alkmaar! This happens every Friday at 10am from early April til September. This is only the second cheese market of the year. I have been looking forward to this ever since I rescheduled our trip.
I have been chanting “cheese market, cheese market, cheese market” for the last 48 hours. Even if Rhett and Justin don’t enjoy the cheese market, they WILL enjoy the relief from my chants. I will go back to randomly singing Temperature by Sean Paul instead.
And I was not disappointed by the cheese!
Alkmaar has traded cheese since the 1300s, and the cheese market started in earnest in the early 1600s. Now, it is mostly spectacle and tradition – history on display.
We got there just after ten and it was pretty packed. Rhett put me up on his shoulders so I could watch all the cheeses being run back and forth to my heart’s content. They had many tulips out in between the rows of cheese to be seasonally appropriate.
Cheese is bartered for – prices agreed upon – and then it’s taken off for weighing. The cheese carriers pick up the cheese, up to 130kg of it on a barrow, over to the weigh house, and then it’s off to be transported. There’s also a cheesefather who is somewhat of a master of ceremonies. They had translation in a few languages as things rolled on.
Overall, it was very festive – a few stands sold poffertjes, snacks, and crafts. Oh – and cheese. I might have purchased like 5 pounds of cheese to take home. If my luggage is overweight – this is why.
After lunch, we explored the cheese museum, which is in the weighhouse that overlooks the cheese market festivities. They had informative displays on traditional Dutch cheesemaking, and information on how it progressed into modern automation, complete with a milking robot.
Importantly, it only rained like five sprinkles on us today!
And before departure – we of course got some poffertjes.
On our way back, we stopped at Zaanse Shans, another open-air museum that is decidedly a lot more touristy. It’s got a few working windmills and other historic displays. The tourist hordes had descended upon this place. Lots of buses and foreign groups. It’s quick access to Amsterdam, so it’s probably an easy place for a half day trip.
It is also a collection of relocated and reconstructed traditional buildings, but this place is a lot more shiny for tourists. There were displays about the making of cheese, bread, and clogs – but of course, it comes with a sales pitch and gift shop 🙂 For that reason, I’d recommend the Zuiderzee museum over Zaanse Shans – but if this is your exposure to traditional Dutch life and crafts, take it. It’s still cool through its touristy veneer.
The clog house was a small delight, with its history of clogs, how they are carved, and display of intricate clogs. I even got to see a bedazzled clog. Amazing. Ok, and it is 3/4 gift shop.
I had two missions really: eat a stroopwafel and see the inside of a working windmill. We picked one in the far back of the park, on the river. This windmill was a sawmill. They were preparing and sawing logs into boards – and we were in luck, because they were preparing a log for loading as we arrived.
It was oddly zen, watching the sawmill work with wind power. The wind wasn’t too strong today (????), so they could only do one log at a time. This was worth the visit to see the inner workings of the windmill!
And I DID get my stoopwafel – I got one with “disco dust” on it, which was an obscene amount of sprinkles. Delicious.
Tomorrow is our last full day here – we intend to spend it in Amsterdam, after getting our covid tests done. What fun! And of course, it’s going to rain on us. 🙂